“To-morrow, if all’s well. Is it your little boy who’s going to show Pelle how things go? The bailiff spoke of some one who’d go out with him and show him the grazing-ground.”
“Yes, it’s that Tom Noddy there. Here, come out so that we can see you properly, you calf! Oh, the boy’s gone. Very well. Does your boy often get a thrashing?”
“Oh yes, sometimes,” answered Lasse, who was ashamed to confess that he never chastised the boy.
“I don’t spare mine either. It’ll take something to make a man of such rubbish; punishment’s half what he lives on. Then I’ll send him up here first thing to-morrow morning; but take care he doesn’t show himself in the yard, or there’ll be no end of a row!”
“The mistress can’t bear to see him, I suppose?” said Lasse.
“You’re just about right. She’s had nothing to do with the making of that scarecrow. Though you wouldn’t think there was much there to be jealous about! But I might have been a farmer’s wife at this moment and had a nice husband too, if that high and mighty peacock up there hadn’t seduced me. Would you believe that, you cracked old piece of shoe-leather?” she asked with a laugh, slapping his knee with her hand.
“I can believe it very well,” said Lasse. “For you were as pretty a girl as might be when you left home.”
“Oh, you and your ‘home’,” she said, mimicking him.
“Well, I can see that you don’t want to leave any footmarks behind you, and I can quite well pretend to be a stranger, even if I have held you upon my knee more than once when you were a little thing. But do you know that your mother’s lying on her deathbed?”
“Oh no! Oh no!” she exclaimed, turning to him a face that was becoming more and more distorted.